Re: Rows in a table

170sys_at_netcom.com (170 Systems) writes:

:Lynn Wood (lynnwood_at_crash.cts.com) (aka Greg) wrote:
 

:: My questions to any employees at Oracle & Informix is:
 

:: 1. What is the maximum no of rows that can be stored.
:: (Above figures only account for current volume, and not for growth)
:Oracle: no maximum

I'm not sure this is entirely accurate, though from a practical point of view there is no limit on the number of rows in Oracle that one could reasonably expect to hit.

The ROWID appears to be a 16 digit hexadecimal field, which means that there would be a limit of 256^16 rows assuming that a ROWID +must+ be unique. Thus, the limit is 340,282,366,920,938,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 rows. :-)

A somewhat more practical limit is the maximum size of an Oracle database, which (depending on which answer you believe) is somewhere between 4 and 35 terabytes. You get this by multiplying the maximum number of blocks by the maximum block size. According to the Version 7 SAG, the maximum number of blocks is 2^32 -1. The maximum block size (under UNIX, at least) is 8K. Multiply these together and you get 35 terabytes.

However, the SAG also says that the maximum is 4 terabytes, depending on block size, so I'm not sure which answer is correct. (The minimum block size is 1K, which may be where the 4TB number comes from.) In either case, it's a whole lot more data than I'm likely to ever have.

---
Michael Nolan, Sysop for the DBMS RoundTable on GEnie
nolan_at_notes.tssi.com, dbms_at_genie.geis.com
(posted from nolan_at_helios.unl.edu)